Tuesday, April 30, 2013

I was tempted to add an extra beat panel between panels five and six and making it an eight-panel comic but then I'd need to finish with a snappy, sarcastic thought bubble, which might be inappropriate if I'm admitting that this situation actually happened nearly verbatim in class. I think nothing but the best of my students, particularly in public.

Sunday, April 07, 2013

I wanted to make a list of five or ten of my favorite (x, why?) comics which were music-inspired. Then I discovered that I only started using the Music tag in 2011. That means that nearly four years of comics were left "unsung". (Ouch! Yes, I meant to do that.)

So I only had 9 such comics labeled, and many more that I remember were not. The problem is that there are some that I don't remember. Not surprising that I've reused some gags because I've forgotten that I'd done them before. Others I remember making, but I don't remember when I made them.

Thursday, April 04, 2013

Film critic Roger Ebert passed away. Obituaries are all over the Web, so I'll stick to a couple of brief anecdotes.

First, there was a time when I would check what thought about a new film and act accordingly. That is, do the opposite, which actually worked out more than it didn't. That wasn't just film; lots of critics hated the "popular" stuff.

Ebert was also indirectly responsible for me getting two columns published in the New York Daily News. Back in the late 80s/early 90s, the News had a Counterpunch (Talk Back to the Critics) column in the Sunday paper. Two of the columns I had published were rebuttals to his columns. (The News carried him for a time.) One took him to task for a non-review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the other was a defense of Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, in which Ebert found overt racial overtones, or some such nonsense.

In closing, I'm sure I preferred Ebert's TV show with Gene Siskel over individual columns. I enjoyed the clips back in the days when that was the only place you could find them, and you had two points of view to compare and contrast. And now both of them are gone.

About Me

Mr. Burke is a high school math teacher in New York as well as a part-time writer, and a fan of science-fiction/fantasy books and films.
He started making his own math webcomic totally by accident as a way of amusing his students and trying to make them think just a little bit more.
Unless otherwise stated, all math cartoons and other images on this webpage are the creation and property of Mr. Chris Burke and cannot be reused without permission.
Thank you.